Saturday, 21 September 2013

What the Ancient Greeks Knew about Slaves' Dream-Lives

While suffering from concussion earlier this summer I agreed to be
in three places at once this week: introducing the
great Orlando Patterson at a conference on slavery in Indiana, co-relating classics
and social class in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and interpreting ancient dream
interpretation in Poland. So I have chosen according to personal loyalty on the
conference front (Poland) and sent video talks to the other two (something I may
do more of now, it being nicer to the planet than planes).

Fortunately for my hosts, virtual and actual, and for my own sanity, there
is a link between all three talks: our one surviving ancient handbook of dream
interpretation, by Artemidorus of Daldis, who recorded the colourful dreams
experienced by his customers—mostly Greeks—under the Roman Empire. His book, The
Interpretation of Dreams, enthralled Sigmund Freud, who borrowed the title
for his own most famous work, Traumdeutung,
in 1899/1900.

Freud was struck by the
numerous positions in which ancient Greek men told Artemidorus that they had enjoyed
dream-sex with their mothers. But the real reason why Artemidorus is important
is that his accounts of the dreams experienced by his many slave-class
customers provide our best surviving access to the inner, mental and emotional
lives of the millions of people in Greek and Roman antiquity who were not free.

Artemidorus tells us that the
same dream will mean different things depending on whether you are a slave ornot: ‘Olive
trees whose fruit has been gathered up means good luck for all but slaves, for
whom it means thrashings, since it is by blows that the fruit is taken down’.If a pregnant free woman dreams she gives
birth to a snake, it is a good omen, but in a slave woman it can only mean that
the child will become a runaway, ‘because a snake does not follow a straight
path’.

Slaves' dreams tell desperately sad stories. A house-slave dreamt that
one star fell out of the sky while another star ascended into the sky.When
his master died, he thought he was free and without any master. But it came to
light that his former master had a son, and he was forced to become his
slave.The fallen star therefore stood
for the man who died, while the one that ascended into the sky signified the
one who would control him and be his master.

This slave’s disappointment on discovering that he was legally compelled
to serve another man, much younger than his previous owner, can only be
imagined. Another slave, whose
subconscious clearly could not cope with his subordination, dreamt that he was
playing ball with Zeus. He then quarrelled with his master, and, since he took
certain liberties in his speech, he antagonised the man. For Zeus signified the
master. The ball-playing indicated both the exchange of words on an equal
footing and the quarrel itself.

Artemidorus was a man of his time, and often recycles embarrassing prejudices
against slaves. He argues, for example that slaves are more physical and less
cerebral than the free. Slaves are often represented by animals (e.g. mice) and
body parts (feet) in dreams, whereas the free are represented by more abstract
symbolism to do with souls.

But Artemidorus’ book also undermines the ancient distinction between
slaves and free in ways which are paralleled by no other ancient evidence. It
undermines the hierarchies of waking life by his actual practice of taking slave dreams seriously. The egalitarian form of
many passages in the amazing ancient dream book implicitly dismantles its
hierarchical content. Ancient slaves may
have left us few documents in their own voices. But the soul – or psyche - of
the ancient slave was of course really there all the time. [A full discussion of Artemidorus' slave dreamers is included in Alston, Hall & Proffitt, Reading Ancient Slavery and can be read free online ninth offprint from the top here].